1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to an electronic data processing system and method for sound synthesis using sound samples, and particularly to such a system or method using transfer functions.
2. Discussion of the Related Art
Most conventional electronic musical instruments use so-called wavesamples of actual musical instruments as building blocks for synthesizing simulations of the instruments that sound realistic. The electronic instruments must switch or fade between multiple time-domain sample waves, which must be sufficiently numerous to encompass an entire keyboard and to provide adaptability for various rates of sound change. The resulting stored sample sets have sizes in the megabyte range.
Alternatives for avoiding the large amount of data in sampled sets include physical modeling or additive synthesis. Additive synthesis can, for example, interpolate very simply between loud and soft sounds for a sound in between. Nevertheless, such additive synthesis becomes prohibitively expensive in its use of logic because of the addition of many sinusoids (up to 64 per voice) and the complexity of controlling the amplitudes of the constituent sinusoids.